The Opposite of Loser

by Craig K. Damrauer

Bobby and I are standing out in a field of godforsaken overgrazed scrub ass brush waiting for the Shrimpy Brothers to drive up in whatever luxury automobile they happen to be favoring today so that we can unload on them the land that stretches from here to the abandoned farmhouse all the way to the long drainage ditch just over the wavy curve of the horizon. I begin to get The Feeling real badly. The Feeling is that same alkaline rush of extra cool air inside my head that I felt when I got my skull bashed in with a baseball bat that one time, the same time that after that I began to get The Feeling in the first place.

Bobby is dancing back and forth the length of the car, his long feet slapping down like paddles. "I'm putting a curse on the land," he says.

"Don't do that until we've sold it," I say, though I know he is limp in the area of hoodoo.

"That's just a technicality," Bobby says. He wanders around to the back of the car and opens the trunk. Inside, he grabs his daughter's one eyed, hair needs washing doll and reaches into a dug out place in the thing's back and pulls out a mallet bat cut from three inch steel plate with a handle wrapped in genuine cow leather. "May I introduce to you," Bobby says, holding it up to me and flashing one of his big silver toothed grins, "The Convincer."

"Jesus, Bobby," I say, "You're going to get us killed."

"I made it myself," he says.

He puts the thing in my hands and when he lets go it nearly pulls me to the ground. I take a few limp wristed swings, feeling the weight jerk my shoulder roughly. The words, The Convincer, are burned into the handle with an unsure third grade script. "It's nice work," I say, handing it back to Bobby, The Feeling stronger than ever, "but it won't be necessary. This is a ten minute deal."

"Yeah, well, it's just in case," Bobby says and he shoves The Convincer into the doll's back and tosses the doll into the trunk like it was forgotten by his daughter the last time the court granted him visitation rights.

Overhead, the sun is regarding the ground with a predatory glare. Bobby announces that he needs to urinate and walks around the side of the car. He tries to write Bobby Ray Devlin was here with his pee but doesn't get the last e and so it says Bobby Ray Devlin was her.

I keep a lookout for the dust trail of a car approaching and all I see is a jackrabbit. "Look, there's life," I say, pointing.

Bobby shoots at the jackrabbit with a fake rifle making the same, pyoing, fake rifle noise from when we were kids. "Got it," he says, blowing fake smoke off the end of his finger.

I kick the dirt with the toe of my boot. It's like kicking concrete. The sun and the drought, evil brothers, have not been kind to the worms, and the grasses, and the lady bugs. The grasshoppers, however, seem to like the little canyons of cracked topsoil and blistered ruined earth. And, I guess, the jackrabbits.

.

"Say, which one is the shorter one?" Bobby asks me.

I'm in the middle of my dream, the dream about how it rains gentle droplets and the water soaks into the earth until all the pieces go back together again and the soybeans and corn and cantaloupe and cattle return and then go out again and crops turn to deep grasses, the buffalo sprout up as if they were seeded, and range until the earth grows cold and the glaciers creep in. "Shorter what?" I say.

"The shorter brother?"

"Wayne is the shorter brother," I say.

"Darrin's the one with the mini arm then?" Bobby says.

"Exactimento," I say.

"What if they don't show up?"

"They'll show up," I say. But I have my doubts so I summon them. I hold my breath and do the incantations: words so deep they are not written, words so ancient they are not spoken. My eyes roll back and my head points skyward. I stretch out my arms and then I kneel. I would grab dirt but I have to settle for prying a patch of grey skin from the earth.

I want rid of this land. I want to slip out from the rope of the voodoo charm that was set on it many generations ago sucking the life right out from underneath. We bought it, me and Bobby, because of information; you can learn a lot studying the yellowish pages of that big book in the County Seat. But you never really know what you're buying until you walk barefoot, letting the soil become a part of your blood. Here, there is no soil, just hateful hardened flakes.

We bought the land from the man whose grandfather ran the Indians off of it. The man who told us, when he was signing the deed over to us, that the land just didn't work anymore and he didn't understand what we could want it for. "Something's broke," he said, his blue eyes drained of color.

I wanted it in part because I knew what the Shrimpy Brothers knew, that a few years of paying the taxes on this worthless stretch of rock and forgotten grass would pay itself off the minute the legislators got their act together down at the State House. But more than that I wanted to talk to the ancient ones. I wanted to ask the question that I already know the answers to, the one about why it all went down the way it did.

A couple times I tried to come out at dusk and listen to the wind talking. The coyote spirits told a harrowing tale of starvation and abandonment. There were whispers from the people but their messages were drowned out by the call and response of insect buzz. What I did get was cold and windblown with a genuine feeling that the land, this land anyway, has nothing left to offer.

.

There in the distance is a trail of dust flying 80 miles an hour. I get The Feeling really strong now, so strong that it makes my stomach shoot sour taste up into the back of my throat which, when it combines with the alkaline in my mouth makes for a candy bar of fear.

"They're here," I tell Bobby, my throat closed near to a whisper.

We watch the dust rising on the horizon, a small puff blowing out into a larger train, kicking up, the disturbing of the tortured earth. The dust is right across our field of vision and then it makes a long slow curve and comes straight at us. The Shrimpy Brothers are driving a Cadillac Coupe de Ville, I can now see the grill in the heat waves as it races toward us. I can hear the high pitched whine of its souped up engine, growing bigger and bigger with every piece of dead bush it passes, every rotted and forgotten fencepost blown by, every starved cow skeleton crunched underneath.

I can see now that there are antlers, horns, antlers, some kind of pointed and curled animal head part attached to the Cadillac's front grill. And then I see the standard poodle with its head stuck out the back window, its floppy ears riding the air currents.

They hit the brakes running and skid along the dirt for a good fifteen feet, coming to a stop not too far from our car.

Bobby yells, "No dogs. That's not part of the deal."

Darrin Shrimpy steps out of the driver's side, his long, scuffed snakeskin boots landing on the soil like hammers. He slams the car door with his good arm, the shrunken one perched in front of his stomach.

Wayne gets out on the other side. The dog, now that I get a closer look at it, is some variation on a Standard Poodle and a Lassie dog. It's limping in its hind quarters.

"No dogs," Bobby says, again.

"The dog goes where we go," Darrin says, his voice cutting down the heat.

"Jesus, Bobby," Wayne says, pleadingly. "We just thought it would be nice for her to run around." They're standing now in front of the Caddy. Wayne has his little fist looped around the dog's collar.

"Bobby's been bitten by just about every four and two footed pet on the planet," I say, helpfully. "Ferrets, iguanas, macaws, gerbils, parakeets, guinea pigs."

"Dogs," Bobby adds, in a reminding tone.

"She's harmless," the little brother, Wayne, says. "She's twelve and twice hit by cars."

"If the dog goes, we go," Darrin says, narrowing his eyes.

"Just keep her tied to the bumper of the car," I say, diplomatically.

"A half hitch," Bobby says.

"I wasn't in the boy scouts," Darrin says.

I walk up to the dog and put my hand near her snout. She sniffs it and then immediately plunges her nose past my hand and into my crotch. Bobby has one foot up on the bumper of our car, ready to leap onto the trunk if the beast were to get loose. Darrin pulls her back by the collar and then leashes up the dog by making a loop over his flipper arm.

"What's her name?" I say to Darrin.

"We've been calling her Boy."

"As in Good Boy?"

"Yeah."

"But she's a girl."

"Yeah, I know."

"As long as you know," I say. Then I turn toward Bobby and yell, "It's cool, she's cool."

"Better be," Bobby says.

.

We begin the real estate deal with the ritual naming of who looks like what actor. The brother with the shrunken arm, Darrin, starts since they are our guests on our land. "Tony, you look like Peter Falk," he says to me.

I bow deeply, thanking him. Then it is my turn. "Wayne," I say, "Wayne you look like Roman Polanski in Chinatown."

Wayne removes his sweat stained cowboy hat and bows deeply. I notice that he has a little half dollar sized bald spot on the top of his head. It is now his turn. Wayne puts his hand on his chin and props his arm up with his other arm. "Bobby, Bobby you look like."

Now Bobby knows, and I know, and just about everybody knows that they don't let cats as ugly as Bobby into the movies and so there aren't any actors out there that he looks like. We've worked this to our advantage on half a dozen real estate deals because it sets the procedures off on a crooked stance. The same way you can't concentrate at a restaurant when the table is short in one leg. So there's Wayne with his hand propped up, sizing Bobby up and down, and Bobby begins to laugh. It's not a giddy laugh and it's not a cruel laugh. It's not uncomfortably, or cynical knowledge either. It's this little he he he, like you might hear at a child's birthday party.

"Burt Reynolds," Wayne says. "Definitely Burt Reynolds." And then he starts Qualifying. "But with gold and silver teeth, and shorter, and with pocks on his face, and with one crossed eye, and a scar over his brow."

Bobby bows quickly, bless his heart, and says, "Darrin, you most certainly, especially in profile, look like the Spanish actor Umberto Cruz."

Darrin smiles widely and then bows. "I thank you very much" he says.

"Okay, break," I yell, and clap my hands once.

When we are in our huddles I say to Bobby, "Who the hell is Umberto Cruz?"

Bobby shrugs. "Made him up," he says.

"You can't make up an actor."

"I just did," Bobby says. "There ain't no motherfucker on the silver screen that has a paddle for an arm and the looks of a battle tank."

"Well you could use TV."

"TV either."

"What about that actor that played the Thalidomide Kid in Not Everybody Gets Roses?"

"Number One, those were prosthetics, and Number Two, he was basically as handsome in the face as they come. Deep cheeks, amazingly full curls, sensuous eyes. You're playing to their strength," Bobby says, "you're concentrating on the arm and not the man."

"Dustin Hoffman from Midnight Cowboy," I say, helpfully.

"Yeah, if he fucked a rat weasel," Bobby says.

I give a quick glance over to the Shrimpy Brothers to see if they are ready. Darrin pets the dog with his flipper and it makes my stomach go upside down.

Schedule A

It is this patch of scrub ass brush that the Shrimpy Brothers are after. The entire rest of as far as you can see they own as Darrin Shrimpy is convinced, and has been for some time, that this is the place, smack dab here is where the new airport is going to be built.

We have that to our advantage. The fact that they own practically the entire side of the Monopoly board in flat overbaked land, and we just so happen to have Park Place. I'd sit on it but for the Information.

The Information lays out as follows. Because I am the pedestrian type, because I dress the way I do, because of the knotted hair and the limp and the little stains on the front of my trousers, I am invisible to the legitimate world. Because I drank in the bar across the street from the supposed airport's developer's supposed office, I was privy to certain conversations by supposed developers about said pieces of land, one of which we happen to be standing on right now. Conversations which lead me to the conviction that this hardened stretch will not be bulldozed, will not be built upon, that no airplanes will kiss this ground when landing.

They used the term Loser's Land, but I beg to differ. I am not a loser, au contraire, I am a winner. I am a winner because I am smart. I am a winner because I use my weaknesses to my advantage. I am a winner, despite the schoolyard chants to the contrary, despite the halfbreed status, despite a life's worth of deprivation by way of physical abnormalities. And when the Shrimpy Brothers consolidate their holdings across this abandoned plane, handing me and Bobby a tidy profit, well that little triumph will make me a double winner.

.

We are walking the perimeter. Bobby leads, reading from a map that we stole from the public library of the original division from the original farm. When he finds them, he bangs down on the ends of the steel fence posts with his palm. I can tell by the way he does this that he's trying to put a curse on the land, either that or it's part of a kidlike superstition. Every once in a while he looks back at Darrin and the dog, who are walking three horse lengths behind, and yells, "Don't you dare."

I'm walking next to Wayne. He's leaning forward and throwing his elbows out chicken style, trying to keep up. I spend a little time laughing on the inside about this but then I realize that his limp's just about as bad as mine. He keeps telling me that Bobby is a Liability and that without him I'd be as successful as the Shrimpy Brothers have, knock wood, been.

I don't tell him that as soon as we're done walking the perimeter I'm going to take off them a suitcase full of money, Liability or not, and give them in return a dog of a parcel of land that has been kicked so many times it growls at its own tail wag. Instead I say to Wayne, "I've been thinking much the same thing. He's a good man but he's just not cut out for this."

"What'll you do, then?" Wayne says.

"What do you mean?" I say.

"I mean, you have some big decisions to make," Wayne says.

"In what way?" I'm playing dumb and wondering if Wayne is dumb enough to recognize this.

"Well, you're going to have to acknowledge the liability. Acknowledge it and, you know, make some according adjustments."

"Oh I will, I will," I say.

"Well why don't you start now?" Wayne says. He looks over at me, his cowboy hat is cocked back just enough that I can see a nicotine yellow, hatbrim stain line tattooed across his forehead.

"Can't," I say. I'm feeling strangely out of breath here and I look ahead at Bobby for signs that we're rounding the back end and heading toward the cars. Bobby leans into his steps like he's trying to lose us.

"Why not?"

"Well, for one, Bobby's name's on the deed. Right next to mine."

"That doesn't mean he has to be involved," Wayne says.

I think now about how Bobby was the first kid to come up to me that first day in first grade. His body was much the same way it is now, a little squarish and slightly overlarge compared to his head. I think about how he said, "Want to play?" as if the rules were perfectly understood, and how I felt rescued somehow at that moment from things that had yet to be.

"This is the way it is," I say, "in all it's bumps and glory."

"But how much are you willing to pay for his presence?"

"I don't get your meaning," I say. But I do.

"He's going to cost you some money today," Wayne says. "At what point do you decide it's not worth it?"

I think about this for a second, listening to the ground aching underneath my feet. "I guess that's the kind of thing you just feel out," I say. "Like I said, his name's on the deed." I'm traveling the little sketchy paths from first grade to here, wondering how it comes to pass that the two of them are always so easily cut from the herd and whether this kind of thing is just an inevitability.

"We could shoot him for you," Wayne says, with a sun hardened smile. "I've got a gun right there in the suitcase with all the money."

I feel a prickling inside my throat. "I don't think that would be necessary," I say.

Wayne doesn't say anything. He looks down at the ground and we shuffle along together for a little bit, the soil crunching unevenly below our boots. I am, in a fanciful and unrealistic way, reviewing our options which include levitation as well as previously unknown super powers. Running is out, not just because of my leg limp but because of the fact that the land does not rise or curve for as long as a bullet needs to travel and still be considered a straight shot.

"I was just joshing you," Wayne finally says. "Back there about Bobby."

I let it float out into the air and settle down before responding. "It's alright," I say, immediately realizing that he hadn't apologized.

.

When we get back to the cars, Bobby starts doing jumping jacks, clapping his hands really loudly at the top. "I'm ready," he yells, "I'm ready, I'm ready, I'm ready."

I watch Darrin and Wayne give each other a look which constitutes a pulled-up forehead and this sort of I-told-you-so sourness across the lips. I then watch the ground, feeling myself sinking toward it. I am not being absorbed by it because it's far too hard, but I am, rather, melting on top. I am not a protective coating for the sun baked soil, I am just one more thing that died trying to get back in.

Bobby slaps his hands on the front of our car and shouts, "Let's do this."

I look at Wayne and Darrin and ask for a second.

Darrin nods.

As I lead Bobby around the car toward the back to a place that feels more private, I tell him about the gun.

"I have a plan," Bobby says.

"I have a plan, too," I say, hoping this will end the discussion.

"You go first."

I don't really have a plan, to be honest. What I do have is a sense. I see several flashes of the future. One has us lying there bleeding together as the dog licks our faces of any remaining salt. Another has us gratefully signing over the deed with a whole lot of loss taken, ballpoint signatures on the hard top steel of the car hood. "Let's just get the fuck out of here," I say.

"If we leave now, we'll never sell this land," Bobby says. He's right, of course, these are my words he's giving back to me. I told him as much when he objected to my phoning the Shrimpy Brothers a month or so ago and suggesting that we were ready to sell. They'd called him a kike faggot some years ago, an assertion that has truth along the sides, when you consider the religion of his grandmother and the fact that he once let a drunken sailor suck on his dick, but is a ridiculous thing to say. He'd never forgiven them in the way you don't make eye contact with the sixth grade bully; those words they'd said in passing at a bar meant to cause a streak along his brain like staring at a hundred watt bulb for too long.

"How prepared are you?" I say.

"I feel rested, if that's what you're asking."

"It's not." I look sideways back at the Shrimpy Brothers. Darrin is playing with the dog. She's jumping up lamely and putting her paws somewhere on his torso. He's pulling at something in her mouth by clamping it between his good hand and the shrunken one.

"Where's the gun, you say?"

"Wayne told me it was in the bag with the money."

"I'd be surprised if it were the only one," Bobby says, in a way that sounds like I've led us down a path that's far too deep in the woods.

"I don't want to get killed. Especially not over this piece of scrub ass brush," I say, apologetically.

"We're a little too far into the proceedings," Bobby says, with a harshness that makes me think I might pee. "Besides that, I already spent the money." He looks at me carefully and I see a trail of earnest panic all the way back to first grade. The same trail he followed to the principal's office on my behalf, the same trail he followed to juvenile hall, the same trail he followed to jail. His face has never lost its boyish pudge, no matter how many two-by-fours were smashed across his nose, no matter how many times he stepped in front of a drunken set of fists, no matter how many times he owed the wrong guy the wrong amount of money. I want, in some way, to go back to that moment we met and tell him that it is okay, that I'll be alright on my own. I want to be a better friend, a safety net instead of a leech.

"I don't know much about chess," I say, "but this feels like that moment when you know you're fucked."

"I've never lost a game of chess in my life," Bobby says.

.

I'm standing next to Bobby, leaning on the hood of the Shrimpy Brother's car saying numbers back to Darrin, numbers which are fairer and higher. Darrin's returning numbers which are dreadfully low, low enough that I feel a little insulted for my intelligence despite what I already know.

"You're lowballing us," I say, when there is a break in the action.

"This is a true valuation," Darrin says. "You see what it looks like."

Bobby starts tapping his toes. He keeps pinching his eyes tightly closed and then blinking them open as wide as possible like there is a flick of dust in them.

I watch out of the corner of my eye as Wayne walks around the back of the Coupe de Ville, opens the trunk and pulls out a big alligator skin bag. He closes the trunk and sets the bag in a crumpled heap on top and I think I hear the chunk of the gun settling at the bottom.

"Still, Darrin," I say, "you have to be kidding us both."

"I'm not," Darrin says.

I say the last number. I say that number again.

Each time Darrin shakes his head. He says the last number he said and then he says, "Final offer."

"Final offer?" I say.

"Final offer," Darrin says.

"Final offer?" Bobby says.

"Final offer," Darrin says, turning to look at Bobby for the first time.

I stare at Darrin, those little black dot rat eyes, that long needly nose. His flipper shakes with strained excitement. I'm listening to the pale brush of wind across the colorless grass tips. I'm listening to dead bug carcasses blowing along the crispy ground, little plastic scrapes that go on until the earth turns dark at its edges. I'm listening to the pneumatic hiss of the sun headed toward the horizon.

The money he's offering is half what Bobby and I shelled out for the land in the first place. I feel shame that's rooted in third grade ritual beatings, the way the bullies would separate me from Bobby because I was small for my age but not small enough to be invisible. I feel the nakedness of being alone amid the circle of witness on the blacktop. When I look from Darrin to Wayne, I begin to realize that the Shrimpy Brothers have this unassuming look on their faces, the malevolent curiosity with which a coyote regards a bunny rabbit, and I know that we're going to be doing this deal whether I like it or not.

This is when I hear the trunk of our car slam and a sudden spike shoots its way up into my balls. "Don't worry," I think I hear him whispering.

I look now, taking my eyes off of Darrin's little hateful face. I turn to see Bobby with his daughter's doll cradled in his arms. He walks around the car toward us. His feet hit the ground with a deliberate slap. His body, which has always had a sure solid balance, born mainly out of it's strange egglike proportion, seems purposeful. I get The Feeling and it's almost like it never bothered to go away in the first place. Saliva rushes around my molars. My mouth feels like it's being charged with a nine volt. What I'm thinking about is the way time slows. What I'm thinking about is the amazing failure this land is, was, and will always be, and how I don't want to be wrapped up into that fortune. I'm watching now, as if it were on television, as Bobby takes the odd way around the Shrimpy Brother's Coupe de Ville, holding his daughter's stained and yellow doll, and stands next to Wayne.

The dog makes a low, deep throated noise that must be a growl. Bobby turns and smiles at the animal.

A crow floats by on a hot wave of air with its eyes to the ground looking fruitlessly for roadkill.

The car's engine makes a tink, tink, tink steel settling sound.

.

I am raising my hand in a motion that is half shielding and half stopsign at the precise moment Wayne is brained by the child’s doll. His legs drop out from underneath him and his body hits the ground like laundry falling from the sky. Bobby now has the gun, which he is cracking open to see if it’s loaded and then cocking, setting a bullet in the chamber. Darrin begins to sing such a high note that it causes the aged, twice car hit, limping dog to rear up and howl like a maimed donkey.

Bobby levels the thing at Darrin, who is crawling backward using his good hand and shielding his face with his flipper, and I yell, “Bobby,” without finishing the sentence.

Bobby’s head is tilted down. He’s staring straight out the top of his eyes at Darrin, who now jerks his feet up and pulls with his arm as if he’s swimming on top of the concrete soil. “Just a minute,” Bobby says, sweetly, “I’m busy.”

Darrin says, “Bu, bu, bu, bu,” and the dog makes a slight cry.

And then there is a great crack and I watch the bullet spin it’s way out of the gun barrel, pushing aside all of the air until it punches into Darrin’s face. His head goes purple almost immediately and I feel the near release of my bowels.

“I don’t play chess,” Bobby says to me, “I never have and I would think you’d know that by now.” Bobby walks over to Wayne, who appears to be sleeping, cocks the gun once more and shoots him in the head.

It is the electric chair in this state, I know because they took our class on a trip to the penitentiary in sixth grade and Bobby and I pressed our faces to the glass that separates the witnesses from the guy being fried. I’m crying now, little immature droplets falling from my eyes toward the ground. Take-backs are not allowed. The teardrops land with an echoing thud and are absorbed gratefully into the soil. Now it’s raining, I can hear the droplets beating the ground all around me.

This is the scene for what seems like forever. And then I fly up into the air watching the sky as a thick knotted blanket of clouds pulls itself across the sun, and thunder begins rolling down the long valley. In the distance, the rain pounds the ground like drums, like a stampede, and I can hear droplets joining droplets, first a trickle and then the flow of gathering force. Then I look down as the cars take on a toyness and the people surrounding them — Darrin and Wayne resting on a blanket of seeping red, Bobby wiping the gun off and putting it into Wayne’s hand — become part of the landscape. Then I see the fenceline, then I see the disgraced and crumbled farmhouse, then I see the now filling streambed, then I see the back pasture, then I see the hill, then I see the lone cottonwood, then I see the edge.